Republican candidate Donald Trump is set to be elected as US president for the second time, US media has reported, defeating US Vice-President and Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.
The former president will return to the White House with an assured simple majority of more than 270 Electoral College votes, AP and CNN have projected.
For the third consecutive US presidential election, pollsters got it wrong. For much of the last few months, the consensus from pollsters was that this would be a very close race. Prepare for a long night, everyone said. (Myself included.)
Instead, Trump looks to have secured a resounding victory. This does not look “close”. So what is wrong with election polling?
Polling is just hard. It is increasingly difficult to get people to respond to polls and it is not always easy to figure out how the sample polled corresponds to the broader population. It is also incredibly difficult to predict behaviour by surveying intention. Estimating how many people will be on a diet in November by conducting a survey in July about whether they intend to go on a diet is imprecise, to put it mildly.
Trump’s strategy also involved a focus on what was known as the “low propensity” voters, people who don’t always turn up to vote in elections. Pollsters clearly struggled to come up with a model that could properly estimate whether these people would turn out to vote this time.
Elections are also getting tighter, so polling errors look bigger than they are. This bears some explaining.
We don’t yet know the final vote margin in the key swing states, but it looks like it will end with Trump winning by about 3 percentage points or less in most of the battleground states. That would mean they are all within the margin of error of the polls. The polls thus can look more wrong than they actually are. Even when polling said the race was 50-50, there remained a 60 per cent chance that either candidate would win more than 300 Electoral College votes.
As polling site FiveThirtyEight wrote on its site: “A close race in the polls does not necessarily mean the outcome will be close.”